The modern American governor has never been more powerful.

One party has total control of the government in 40 states for the first time in at least 30 years. Many governors jam through policy agendas with little of the partisan knife fighting that makes legislative progress on Capitol Hill so gruesome.

They’ve used their states as laboratories to create and test the latest policies espoused by their political parties. They’ve seen their budgets swell 30 percent over the last three years, aided by federal pandemic cash. And they’ve leveraged the bully pulpit like few other elected officials can.

Now, the influence of governors is set to swell again this year, as the presidential contest — almost certainly a rematch between two very old, very unpopular combatants — halts significant policy making in Washington, D.C. The winner is sure to face stiff resistance from statehouses as the nation looks ahead to 2028.

With that context in mind, POLITICO on Thursday is convening a half dozen state leaders for its 2024 Governors Summit, a series of one-on-one interviews on the sidelines of the National Governors Association meeting in Washington.

The gathering will feature some of the country’s most influential state executives answering questions from some of POLITICO’s top reporters and editors. The lineup includes Democrats Jared Polis of Colorado and Kathy Hochul of New York and Republicans Brian Kemp of Georgia, Bill Lee of Tennessee, Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma and Chris Sununu of New Hampshire.

To frame those conversations, we’ve assembled a list of the most urgent political and policy questions governors — and, by extension, the country — face in 2024.

— Paul Demko

Question 1

How do you get voters to trust your state’s elections, when many voters probably don’t trust you to be a fair messenger about it?

Faith in American elections has plummeted. Governors have struggled to reverse it.

The once-sleepy process of voting has been anything but since 2020, with an intense focus on the mechanics of American democracy.

Voters are confused, misinformed and discouraged about the process. Yes, the causes have been asymmetrical — former President Donald Trump is responsible for stoking a massive amount of disinformation about the security of American elections. But with the former president likely to be at the top of the ticket again — and showing no signs of letting up on his attacks — trust in American elections is at risk of falling even further.

The problem facing America’s state executives is not dissimilar from what we saw during the Covid pandemic, when public health announcements became, for some Americans, increasingly partisan-coded. That made governors less-effective messengers for significant portions of their constituents. We’ve seen that repeat with once-uncontroversial election policies — like mail ballots — now stoking a sharp partisan divide.

Now the upside: Americans largely still like their governors to a degree federal officials can only dream of — and voters largely trust their local and state elections. A Pew survey from 2022 found that Americans overwhelmingly trust local poll workers to do a good job, and most say the same for their own state. It’s when you ask about the country at large that confidence starts to dip.

The mission for........

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